Thursday, August 27, 2009

The Sausage Maker and his Books

I am a hoarder of books. Since I was a young girl, I have read, collected, organized, dusted and admired row upon row of books. Plays, poetry, novels, non-fiction; I have loved my books like people are supposed to love their children. Tables, desks, windowsills, toilets, kitchen counters-- all serve the same purpose in my home. They're all bookshelves. When I married my husband I imagined a commingling not of genes, but of libraries. His Shelby Foote next to my Thornton Wilder. My Alice Munro rubbing up against his Alan Furst. Our children would be as old as Homer and as young as next week's Book Review. I had met my match.

When you are a hoarder of books, you know that a day will come when your books will prompt an identity crisis, or a crisis of faith; a crisis of space, or at the very least a dust allergy.

Yesterday I restored the freshly-painted dining room. (Which is actually more of a mini-library than a dining room.) I moved heavy pieces of furniture using my little muscles and my enormous will. And then it was time to put the books back on the bookshelves. This was the last piece of the puzzle before going back upstairs to resume work on my own book.

Shouldn't be a big deal, right? You sort the books. You remove those books that are no longer needed. You put the giveaway books in a box. You live your life.

I've seen friends do this. They decimate their bookshelves! They put those books in a box. They put that box on the sidewalk, or in their car; they give it to the Mormons. The truly ambitious sell them to Twice Sold Tales or donate them to the library. My God, I thought, who are these people, and what antidepressants are they on?

At five o'clock I was distraught. Swimming in a lake of books. Drowning, I should say, in titles that no one needs to keep. The Da Vinci Code? There are two people living in this house, and one will never read it and the other didn't like it. Why on earth are we keeping it? Will I ever re-read Al Franken's books about Lies and Truths? If so, doesn't that mean I'm living in the past? Shouldn't I dust them off, thank my lucky stars that the Bush Administration is in the hands of history, and move the fuck on?

Then there are the books that friends have lent me over the years: they don't remember that I have them, and I haven't yet read them, and in some cases I never will, and does that make me a bad person? Shouldn't I be reading, like, a book a day? Shouldn't I have stopped reading Miranda July's short story collection three stories in, when I realized I didn't like it, in order to make time for books like The Year of Magical Thinking and Ulysses? And Proust! My God, Proust! How can I call myself a writer when I've yet to read Proust? I read all of those twee Miranda July stories and yet Proust sits there on my shelf like a Grandfather patiently waiting for his granddaughter to finish primping and remember he needs to use the loo.

My eye landed on one of my Grandpa Morrison's music books. I remembered that I missed him. I was certain I hadn't been a good enough granddaughter. A good granddaughter would have read that book and returned it to her grandpa before he died. What if he died wondering if he would ever hold Verdi's biography again? Cursing the day he lent it to his granddaughter!

Oh, I am a bad person. A bad, bad, bad, bad person.

An unhappy person.

Lazy. And bad. And unhappy.

It was five o'clock, if I may remind you, when the books attacked. The clock chimed and I had a revelation: five o'clock is Happy Hour.

I left the books sprawling like a paper metropolis across the floor, and walked up the hill to meet my friend Erin for a bottle of wine. (Note the use of the word bottle and not glass.) Shortly after I got there, she told me the most amazing story.

A friend of hers worked for a sausage maker in Philadelphia for a number of years. The sausage maker was an old, grizzled man who loved to read. He was such a voracious reader, in fact, that he made Erin's friend-- we'll call him Tom-- drive the sausage truck to New York for deliveries so that he could sit on the passenger side and read all the way there.

I picture him a bit like my grandpa, actually: Tall, barrel-chested, with thick fingers like, um, sausages. Forgive me, but his hands are important, because while he read his books from Philly to NYC he did the most peculiar thing: he would read a page front and back and then, in one swift movement, he'd tear the page out of the book and throw it out the window.

I have seen some amazing things in my life. Ray Charles. Macchu Picchu. The Louvre. Pompeii. A Monster Truck Rally. But I have never gasped with baffled wonderment like I did at the end of this little anecdote.

When I got home Kurt and I found seats between stacks of books, our dinner plates resting on tables of John McPhee and Stephen King, and I told him the story. He was as baffled and impressed as I was. I said it was a philosophical difference; the sausage maker could accept that he had spent his allotted time with each page and then let it go. I, on the other hand, am too deeply attached to the past. I keep books I've already read and will never read again because they keep the past in my home, nearby, so that I can relive it any time I want. It's a fear of death, I said. The sausage maker is liberated from that fear. Page-ripping is his yoga.

Maybe, Kurt said. He looked sort of dazed as he surveyed the room. He stood up and started to move through the stacks. But The Moor's Last Sigh, he sighed. We need that in our home! Auden? You don't get rid of Auden. Every book H.L. Mencken ever wrote-- I need these! The Atlas of World History! The Once and Future King. Emily Post's Wedding Etiquette! Emily Post's . . . Wedding . . . Etiquette.

He only had to say the title once more before we spontaneously reduced our number of books by one. It was such a rush we added The Da Vinci Code to the collection. We dropped the two books by the front door with abandon, drunk with a wanton recklessness: You, children, must make your home elsewhere. We never liked the looks of you.

But soon enough we forgot about the donation box and the sausage maker. Surrounded by our books, we couldn't help reminding each other of our favorites, of the books that changed our lives. There are so many. Today they're all back on the shelves, where they belong.

i am sure a fair quantity of books accumulating dust on your shelves belong to me...they will wait for you until you have time for them. that's what good friends do. i love that you found your own phone number in a book i lent you. that's the best, when they come with surprises.

A few years ago I had to move across the continent, and tried to reduce the number of books I'd have to put in storage. I had about 1600 at the time, and I did manage to take about 400 of them to a second hand book store.

You know what the scary thing is? I still have about fourteen boxes of books in storage. I have no idea how we'll ever incorporate them into this house . . . but every few months I hear them calling to me from their storage unit. That's when I start to think that we don't need furniture. Or a fireplace. Or a shower. The kitty doesn't need his litter box! You could fit at least a couple dozen books where his litter box is . . .

S.P.-- I thought *I* was alone when I read July's book. I kept wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn't appreciate her voice or her stories or her cutesy idiosyncrasies. But once I started to admit it, I found a world of like-minded readers.

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"Alternately side-splitting and stomach-curdling, writer/actress Suzanne Morrison's autobiographical monologue is savagely funny. . . . Through sheer force of talent and personality, she is able to shock and horrify patrons without sacrificing their implicit faith in the complete and total logic of each decision that she makes. Ambitious, ballsy, and hilarious, Yoga Bitch is surely the best one-woman show I've seen all year."

--Virginia Zech, Seattle Weekly

"Suzanne Morrison's memoir is a glorious mash-up of a book. It's all at once a gimlet-eyed look at the ridiculousness of yoga culture, a somewhat reluctant spiritual journey, and a beautifully observed travelogue. But at its core (to use a very yoga-ish word), Yoga Bitch is a love story. Like Austen's heroines, Suzanne Morrison has to figure out who she loves in order to know who she is. The result is an unabashedly romantic book, in the very best way--like watching your funniest, most sardonic friend realize that she's head-over-heels in love." --Claire Dederer, Author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

“I love this book. In an era of so much truth telling and blogging and reality shows we forget how well true stories can be told, when they’re in the right hands. Yoga Bitch has sucked me in and made me laugh and made me think about my own spiritual fucked-up state. You had me at "Do they make you eat your own poop."– Lauren Weedman, Author of A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body and former Daily Show correspondent

“A smart, funny, and keenly observed travelogue of a modern yogini’s quest for awakening. Yoga Bitch flows like a quirky vinyasa, with each pose just twisted enough to be hilarious.”

--Anne Cushman, author of Enlightenment for Idiots: A Novel

"Suzanne Morrison has been through the yoga wars, she has the literal scars to prove it, and she's produced a hilarious and thoughtful memoir."--Neal Pollack, author of Stretch: the Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude.

“Brings the higher path down to Earth with refreshing honesty.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Thoughtful, honest, and hilarious.”—Publishers Weekly

About Me

I’m a writer and performer living in currently-gorgeous Seattle. My first memoir, Yoga Bitch, was published by Random House/Three Rivers in August of 2011 and internationally in 2012. Yoga Bitch began as a one-woman show that has been performed in New York, London, across the country and around the world. Working for several years on a show and a book about the underbelly of yoga has resulted in a peculiar obsession with nasal ambrosia, urine therapy, and terms such as "anal lock," making me a compelling addition to any dinner party.
In between chapters and productions of book and play, I’m writing short fiction and at work on a new show, Optimism, about Ted Bundy and the allure of family lore.